Prominent French film-makers are supported by their national industry and even their lockdown projects have been received with respectful attention. Earlier this year Olivier Assayas’s autofiction Hors du Temps, or Suspended Time, premiered in Berlin – a dreamy Covid-era indulgence that he just about got away with. Now we have a chance to see Bertrand Bonello’s musing sketch Coma: a lockdown essay that preceded his brilliant futurist film The Beast, with many of the same ideas and tropes.
Coma broods on a scary, affectless future in which humanity will evolve away from the primacy of love and selfhood, and in which sexuality and violence will then be prominent as a symptom of the need to feel something, anything. As so often, Bonello sees human beings as mere dolls or puppets; stuffed mammal-shapes whose supposed individuality is a preposterous fiction. Here, a teenage girl (Louise Labèque) mopes impassively in her bedroom, driven half-mad by lockdown boredom; the film’s title hints at the inert hibernation we all went through.
She follows a YouTuber called Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), an elegant philosopher who unburdens herself of disturbing maxims, such as Emil Cioran’s line: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” Coma’s merch includes a strange toy called the Revelator, a colour-guessing game that it is impossible to get wrong, defying the laws of physics, cognition and probability. The girl video-calls with five friends who are amusing themselves by discussing which serial killer is their favourite. In the middle of the conversation a male figure comes up behind one of them and her image vanishes. The action is interspersed with dolls enacting a photo-love melodrama of sexual frustration and loneliness, perhaps inspired by Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
There are stabs of the same fear and revelation that made The Beast so fascinating, but this is in the main unfocused and undisciplined, and the isolation of each character merely drains the film of oxygen.
